Temporary exile

Org-Mode Has Changed My Life!

Nov 10th, 2008

As I move more and more of my life into Emacs, the best editor ever
to grace God’s silicon earth, I discover new jewels of computing
elegance and productivity. One of the most recent additions to my
arsenal is org-mode, the most fantastic tool for keeping my life in
order. Initially, I was excited because it
supports todo lists very well.
After that, I realized what a powerful tool it is for outlines,
managing dates and even publishing. I began by reading the
LJ article by Abhijeet Chavan
and continued on to watch the
Google Tech Talk by Carsten Dominik.
Right now, I’m doing most of my planning, outlining and writing in
org-mode. Since org-mode enables you to have an
agenda view which
gathers your todo items from multiple files, I can keep tasks
associated with their relevant contexts. So, when planning a blog
post, I have the research todo items in with my other notes and
might keep them tagged as such.
One of the coolest things about org-mode is that org files are just
plain text. All of the fun stuff is added when Emacs uses org-mode
to edit the org files themselves. Thus, org-mode files are
exceedingly portable and can be read and edited anywhere. However,
org-mode has several fantastic exporter engines which allow you to
convert org files to a multitude of formats. My personal favorite
is org-export-as-html which will convert the file to an HTML
document, preserving hierarchy, numbering, bulleting, links and
loads more. So, I’m writing all of my important stuff using
org-mode and then just exporting it to HTML to be printed and
shared. It makes all of my handouts for meetings and workshops look
really sweet and the pages include some JavaScript to make
web-viewing easier as well. Additionally, I’m really enjoying using
features like the table editor which
automagically builds plain-text tables
(that’s right kids, ASCII-only tables!) and takes care of nastiness
like resizing, etc. Although I don’t have a real use for it yet,
tables can have formulas which allow them to be used like
lightweight spreadsheets and such. Other neat features include (but
are not limited to):
- Hyperlinks
- Property drawers

Really, it does lots more so for more info, look over
The Org Manual, check out
the website or view the
Worg, a sort of distributed wiki-like
project using git to sync org files. Org-mode made it into Emacs22
and is included by default thereafter. However, the version that
came with the
emacs22 package on Debian Lenny
wasn’t exactly up-to-date so I installed the
org-mode package and
it all worked fine.